Year: 2025

Stockport Venue 12 – Viaduct Park

Contained within Stockport’s £1billion town centre regeneration is the creation of a modern transport hub and one of the key elements of the scheme was to replace the old, dog-eared bus station which was built back in 1981.

So, in 2024 the new Stockport Interchange was opened with eighteen bus stands that can facilitate up to 164 bus departures per hour. There has been space left in the design to accommodate a metro link tram stop if the proposed metro extension to Stockport ever comes to fruition at a later date.  

Stockport Interchange. Image Credit alamy.com

It is a fine set up and has walking links to the shopping areas and the nearby train station and cycling links to the River Mersey and onto the Trans Pennine Trail. There is also a 17 storey, 196-unit Build to Rent residential building with two floors of basement parking located adjacent.

Above the Interchange is a two-acre rooftop green space, Stockport Viaduct Park which is also available for community events. The whole site was officially opened on 17/03/24 and the following weekend events were set up as part of the Stockport Town of Culture Weekender.

A local musician called John Unwin had an idea to recruit and set up a Stockport Community Steel band. He is a very experienced steel band player and community teacher within this musical art. He arranged some preliminary sessions for February, and a fledgling band was created with their debut taking place at Viaduct Park on 23/03/24.

Gill and I decided to support this local initiative and there were over 50 free events at over 25 separate locations in the town over the two-day shindig including opening up the Air Raid shelters and the newly refurbished Hat Works Museum. We initially landed into Stockport train station before gravitating over to have a proper look at the impressive park. Unfortunately, it was a brutal ‘brass monkey’ cold kind of day, but it was at least thankfully dry.  

Stockport Viaduct Park. Image Credit feeds.bbci.co.uk

There were about 50 band members playing that day and the experienced ones were providing direction to the newer recruits. It was great fun, and they played three extended tracks and perhaps naturally one of them was ‘Soul Limbo’.

That song was originally recorded by Booker T and the MGs in 1968 and features a marimba (similar to a xylophone but with a lower range) solo by Terry Manning who was a renowned recording engineer, record producer and musician across a fifty-year time span working with artists such as Led Zeppelin, Otis Redding, Big Star and Shakira.

It also contained cowbell playing by Isaac Hayes, one of the driving forces behind the Southern soul Stax Records label in the 1960’s alongside writing the musical score for the iconic 1971 film ‘Shaft’ and being the voice of the Chef character in South Park.

There is naturally, as ever a riotous cover version of the ditty by Snuff and the original song derives from the band’s sixth album which also features the title track to ‘Hang Em High’, a Clint Eastwood movie released that very year.

‘Soul Limbo’ is perhaps most famous though for being the recognised theme tune for BBC Television’s cricket coverage and BBC Radio’s Test Match Special. In 1999 the Barmy Army England cricket supporters recorded ‘Come on England’ which was set to the same tune and the sister video featured cricketers Ian Botham and Ronnie Irani, umpire Dickie Bird and somewhat bizarrely Chris Tarrant!     

Isaac Hayes. Image Credit dustygroove.com

The steel pan (or drum) derived originally in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1930’s and was built on the template of African drumming. Basically, anything at the musician’s disposal was used to create the sound including metal objects such as dustbins and plant pots.

An important discovery was then made as the addition of convex dents battered into the sides of a 55-gallon oil drum allowed different musical pitches to be created. I adore the tales of those innovations and always muse on the combination of events that results in these breakthroughs!  

I have always been a fan of the mournful evocative sound of the pedal steel guitar and first heard it via a key proponent of the instrument, Ben Keith. He learnt his trade in the Nashville country music scene in the 1950’s and 1960’s and his first participation on a hit record was on Patsy Cline’s 1961 track ‘I Fall to Pieces’.

Ben played with Neil Young for over forty years, featuring on his iconic 1972 album ‘Harvest’ and also played the part of Grandpa Green in a film called Greendale which accompanied Neil’s 2003 record with the same name. He was inducted into the Musician’s Hall of Fame and Museum four years after his death in 2014.

Manchester Venues 182 to 183

Alongside the seemingly omnipresent Action Records in Preston, the other hugely important record shop in my gig going lifetime is Manchester Piccadilly Records. They originally opened in 1978, which was coincidentally also the conception year of Factory Records. They started as a record concession within another shop before morphing into a singular store themselves.

They were located initially in the Piccadilly area before moving to Brown Street near to Piccadilly Gardens. I remember distinctly visiting that particular site many times in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s and I was also in regular correspondence when sourcing many tickets, predominantly for gigs at that stage at the old Manchester International 1. Now one for the kids out there, I use to send a paper item called cheques through the post and then as if by magic valuable tickets were subsequently received on my doormat a couple of weeks later!     

Original site of Piccadilly Records in 1990. Image Credit mdmarchive.co.uk

They had a change of management in 1990 before being caught up in the IRA bombing of 1996. One of the staff at that time still owns a Fugees album which had its cover shredded when the windows blew through in the explosion. A year later they moved into their current location on Oldham Street in the yet to be developed Northern Quarter.

They have moved with the trends and times and exploited the post punk genre in their earlier days and continued to develop and adapt as the digital streaming age came into play. They have received regular newspaper awards and additionally have won the prize for the best independent record store at Music Week and also at the Gilles Peterson worldwide awards. It remains eternally popular and local musicians Tim Burgess and Johnny Marr are regular visitors.  

On an annual basis they used to produce a little book with their albums of the year and also recommendations of timeless lost albums. As a direct result I finally became acquainted with Neutral Milk Hotel’s remarkable 1998 album ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’.

Like all good record shops, they began to showcase and undertake in-store sessions, and a particular one caught my beady eye which was taking place on 31/01/20. It was on a Friday, so I gravitated down there after work. The band in question was the Smoke Fairies who derive from Chichester and consist of Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies.

Smoke Fairies. Image Credit nme.com

They first met at school in Sussex in the 1990’s and undertook a blues musical education by spending 2002 in New Orleans. Their fledgling music then took another direction when they discovered folk when working as car attendants at the Sidmouth Folk Week festival. They subsequently garnered valuable support slots with Bryan Ferry, Richard Hawley and Laura Marling and were the first UK act to release a single on Jack White’s Third Man Records, produced by the man himself.

They were chosen to provide a cover of ‘Alabama’ for a MOJO compilation to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’. On the very day of the gig, they had released their fifth album ‘Darkness Brings the Wonders Home’ which had a brooding melancholia to it, in the vein of PJ Harvey. The duo positioned themselves by the counter and undertook a short enjoyable set appreciated by a decent size audience. I was also then intending to attend a Lovely Eggs session in that location but that was later cancelled by the pandemic.

In 2021 a previously under-used area on the corner of Dale Street and Lever Street was recreated as the Manchester Mala Secret Garden Bar, the land being previously used as a drugs den with paraphernalia and tents being regularly spotted there. It is situated outside the Chapter One bookshop and café within the Northern Quarter and is also nearby to the Travelling Man shop which quite often catches my eye when I walk past, where they specialise in comics, graphic novels and board games.

Mala Secret Garden. Image Credit opentable.ca

As Mala means ‘garden’ in Hawaiian it has now been converted into a Victorian glass house with ‘Parisian-style gardens’ with cable cars resembling cabins with room for individual batches of six people. There are numerous trees and plants and with an additional children’s play area and within the horticultural space there are picnic benches and long tables placed undercover with capacity for eighty punters.

On a Sunday they stage chilled jazz-tinged events and last year I was in brief residence there and I saw a blues based singer called Stephanie performing a short set.